Most people would give almost anything to relieve the misery cold and flu symptoms can bring. You can take over-the-counter medications, but they frequently have side effects such as making you drowsy. There are some natural remedies you can use to help relieve the symptoms of the common cold and flu.

When suffering from cold or flu, make sure that you blow your nose often instead of sniffing it back into your head. Don't blow your nose hard as this can create pressure which may lead to an ear ache.

The proper way to blow your nose is to place a finger over one of your nostrils while blowing gently to clear the other nostril. Always make sure you wash your hands afterwards to help prevent the spread of germs.

It's always beneficial to get plenty of rest while you have the cold or flu as the human body needs rest in order to heal. When you conserve energy by resting, your body can then utilize that energy to heal.

Try gargling with warm salt water to moisten a dry, irritated throat. Use one teaspoon of salt and dissolve it in warm water. Use the salt-water gargle four times a day. You can also use tea that contains tannin in order to tighten the mucus membranes.

You can also make an effective gargle by steeping one tablespoon of raspberry leaves or lemon juice in two cups of hot water. Mix in one teaspoon of honey. After this mixture has cooled to room temperature you can gargle with it. Never, ever give honey to a child younger than 18 months.

Drinking hot liquids like broth, tea or soup can help to relieve congested sinus passages and also help prevent dehydration. Warm liquids also help soothe the inflamed membranes of your nose and throat.

A steamy shower will also work wonders to help moisturize your nasal passages and help you to breathe easier.

Use a mentholated salve such as Vicks VapoRub under your nose to help open your nasal passage and bring easier breathing. An added bonus is if the salve contains menthol, eucalyptus or camphor which will help alleviate the pain of a nose rubbed raw by blowing.

You can apply hot or cold packs to the face over facial sinuses to help relieve pain and congestion, or use a damp, warm washcloth as a compress.

Here are several natural herbal and aromatherapy recipes to help alleviate the worst symptoms of colds and flu:

Cold and Flu Combo Tea

* 3 parts Echinacea
* 3 parts Goldenseal Root
* 2 parts Pau D Arco
* 2 parts Peppermint leaf
* 2 parts Mullein
* 1 part Ginger Root

Directions

Combine all of the Herbs together. Place 2 Tablespoons of mix in jar that can be completely covered. Pour 6 ounces of hot water over the Herbs and seal. Steep for 10 to 15 minutes. Strain Herbs. Drink 1 cup 3 times a day. Inhale the tea to relieve sinus congestion.

Eucalyptus Chest Rub

* 40 drops essential oil of Eucalyptus
* 10 drops essential oil of Camphor
* 2 drops essential oil of Wintergreen
* 1 drop essential oil of Thyme
* 1 ounce Olive Oil
* 1/2 teaspoon Beeswax

Preparation: Add the Beeswax to the Olive Oil and heat until the Beeswax is melted. Use very low heat or a double boiler to prevent burning the oil. When the wax is melted, remove the oil from the heat then add the essential oils and stir to blend.

When the mixture is cool it is ready to use. You can make this using only the Eucalyptus oil if preferred. To use rub a small amount on the chest as needed to relieve congestion.

Cold Combat With Essential Oils

* Orange, - 20 drops
* Eucalyptus - 10 drops
* Juniper berry 10 drops
* Pine Needle - 10 drops
* Basil - 6 drops
* Rosewood - 6 drops
* Ginger - 4 drops

Blend all together and us in a Diffuser or a few drops in 1/4 cup of Epsom Salts added to a bath. You can also place a few drops on a kleenex and insert into your pillow case before bedtime. (This Recipe From Aromatherapy for Vibrant Health and Beauty by Roberta Wilson)

About the Author

Dee Braun is a Cert. Aromatherapist Dr. of Reflexology who teaches Aromatherapy, Reflexology Color/Crystal Therapy at http://www.alternativehealingacademy.com/. Vist the Alternative Healing Academy, which offers home study courses in several natural healing methods. Payment plans are available!

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Owner builder construction loans are specifically designed for borrowers who wish to take on the construction of their own homes without having to hire a general contractor. In this way, the owner builder not only saves a lot of money but also gets a greater amount of control in the outcome and specifications of his home.

Unfortunately, many people are confused about the true role of the owner builder. Simply put, an owner builder is someone who takes on the role of managing the construction process without hiring a builder, or general contractor. Sometimes they are also called an owner-contractor or self-builder. In essence, he or she is the general contractor.

Being an owner builder does not mean having to actually do the physical work yourself. You can, if you want, but it is not required. In fact, this is an important point, because many borrowers think that they have to do much of the labor themselves to save a lot of money.

However, to successfully complete an owner builder construction loan, you never have to lift a hammer if you don't want to. You will still save a lot of money just by managing the process. Consider this: many general contractors never do any actual labor. Instead, they manage the process and charge for the service, not to mention the gathering of the materials and supplies.

Therefore, if you want to be an owner builder, you should focus on the management. Only do the labor that you are truly qualified to do. Otherwise, you'll waste both time and money - things nobody can afford to waste in the middle of a construction loan.

This revelation often becomes misleading for borrowers. They erroneously reason that the role will be easy if they are only managing the process. Unfortunately, this almost always leads to improper planning and disorganized construction.

Just because being an owner builder, focusing on overseeing the project planning and construction, does not have to be complicated, that doesn't mean it is easy. It takes time and energy. To be successful, you must approach the planning phase with as much care as the actual construction.

As the owner builder, you will have to 1) choose the right set of home plans for your area, 2) get the plans approved with your county's code compliance and building permit office, 3) choose and hire the best possible sub-contractors and material providers, 4) compile an accurate budget based on bids and contracts with these sub-contractors, and then 5) actually manage the construction itself. If you don't give steps 1 - 4 the care and attention they demand, then step 5 will potentially be a disaster.

Therefore, who makes a good owner builder? Experience has led to this simple litmus test. You should consider building your own home without a general contractor if you answer "yes" to these three questions:

1) Do you want to build the exact home you have in mind, without compromising either quality or amenities?

2) Do you want to save, on average, 15% to 40% on your new home's construction costs?

3) Are you willing to spend the time and energy in the planning and management of the construction?

There are two very important things to note about the three questions above. First, notice that the first two questions involve possible incentives behind being an owner builder. Indeed, control and money are the two main reasons that people decide to become owner builders. You may have your own specific reasons, but if you don't have a hefty amount of interest in the control and savings that come with the project, then you probably won't be satisfied as an owner builder.

The second thing to note is that the most important criteria listed in the questions above involves time and energy for management. There is no mention of physical labor or any detailed knowledge of construction skills.

Therefore, if you think you will want an owner builder construction loan in order to build your own home without a general contractor, it is a good idea to ask yourself the three questions above. In general, make sure you understand the role of the owner builder and are comfortable with the major benefits and advantages that come with it. And, never forget that a successful owner builder will focus on the planning of the project as much as the actual construction itself.

About the Author

Owner builder construction loans from Owner Builder 101 and Chris Esposito are designed specifically for individuals who want to save money while building their home to their exact specifications - without a general contractor. Visit www.ownerbuilder101.com, or call (877) 876-3688.

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A good storyteller is a person who has a good memory
and hopes other people don't.

--Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb

Let me share with you what I've learned about what to do and not to do on a book tour by sharing my experiences. I'm sure you can do better with a little advance warning and preparation.

Having heard that authors go on book tours when their books are published, I naturally planned to have the granddaddy of all book tours for a "breakthrough" book. At the suggestion of the publisher, I hired a publicist to schedule interviews for us over a period of eight months.

I that his approach featured tying the book back to the availability of consulting services to help people create breakthrough solutions, even though the intent had been to create a book and an approach that people could easily execute on their own.

The tour was scheduled to begin right after the publication date in January 1999. I would visit more than 30 cities during a period of four months. The locations were clustered to allow for efficiency in travel but did require me to cross the country several times. Since it was winter, I would also have to deal with storms, delays, and other weather-related challenges.

In addition, I had been in contact with local CEO organizations across the country and arranged to speak at many events sponsored by such groups. Dozens of groups invited me to speak when I was in their areas. I also scheduled appointments with clients in each area so I could tell them about the book.

The publicist advised me that I would need to have a local slant on the book to create media interest. To meet that need, I did a lot of calculations to identify who the high- and low-performing local companies had been in each locale that I would be visiting.

I soon found that reporters had virtually no interest in our book, but they usually needed help with stories they were already working on about local companies. Give them some good information and quotes about those companies, and our book would at least get a mention.

This approach led to some unusual interviews such as discussing the weaknesses of the ambulance services in Denver and whether the Mirage hotel and casino in Las Vegas had been a good investment. I had to be prepared for anything and everything. Reporters expected me to know everything about their area.

A second thing I learned is that many reporters lacked basic knowledge of business, economics, and financial markets. I met a lot of English majors who were working day jobs in business reporting hoping to pay the bills while writing the great American novel at night. Typically, they wouldn't have met with me at all except that my publicist was persuasive in promising that I would deliver whatever they were looking for.

Those promises kept my staff and me quite busy for the next four months. We had to become free consultants to reporters in order to tell our story.

Another lesson came when I visited book stores in the cities where I was touring: In many cases, there was not a copy of our book to be found! I began to wonder what point there was in visiting so many places when the book wasn't available locally.

To add injury to insult, one day a BMW rear-ended my rental car at high speed on an otherwise empty road as the driver turned his head this way and that to speak to his passengers. I was in pain from whiplash for the next six months. My doctor told me to stop traveling and it would get better. Right.

Gradually it began to dawn on me that while a large book tour sounded good, it wasn't all that it was cracked up to be. A low point came when Steve Wynn, the future casino billionaire, tracked me down by telephone to have a long discussion about his business practices based on an article that I was quoted in that morning.

As we spoke, Mr. Wynn worked out on a treadmill; I could hear his footfalls and puffing as he tried to persuade me that I was wrong. Meanwhile, I had the first of two interviews for that morning to reach in a few minutes. It was frustrating, to say the least.

Meeting the CEOs in person, however, proved to be a pleasant surprise. I was typically allowed two to four hours to provide a workshop based on the book, which gave me time to teach them the main concepts in the book (after correctly assuming they hadn't yet read the book).

While some of the sessions had as few as ten CEOs, others featured over a hundred. Giving so many of these workshops allowed me to find out what material they liked best and understood the most easily, and how much they could accomplish in such a short workshop. With that experience, the workshops kept getting better and better.

Those results made me wish that I had organized the whole trip to only do workshops and had skipped the media part of the journey.

An unexpected benefit for me, although Peter Drucker had told us it would occur, was that I began to understand the content of the book in a new way. In that new understanding, I realized that the book's basic point was that we each know how to organize things to perfection in some areas for individuals and groups, but we don't think of those previously observed models when trying to work on a particular task.

Open up the mental pathways to those perfect experiences, and great things quickly follow. I was particularly impressed by the advantage of carrying that message in a larger group: As the CEOs shared with one another their problems and solutions, their observations sparked more understanding among the other CEOs.

There seemed to be a cumulative learning process that such a group could provide that could not be duplicated in individual tutorials or solitary learning.

So what's my advice for you?

1. Plan to visit those who will use what you wrote about on your book tour.

2. Don't talk to the media unless they show up to hear your talk. Expect them to be confused by what you have to say.

3. Don't give talks in book stores (but do offer to come by to autograph books) because few will come unless you are Jack Welch.

4. Don't travel in the winter.

5. Allow double the time you think you need between talks.

6. Have fun and find out what your book is all about!

About the Author

Donald Mitchell is an author of seven books including Adventures of an Optimist, The 2,000 Percent Squared Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution, The 2,000 Percent Solution Workbook, The Irresistible Growth Enterprise, and The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. Read about creating breakthroughs through and receive tips by e-mail through registering for free at

http://www.2000percentsolution.com

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Are you thinking hosting your web site with a new hosting company or possibly just switching your hosting over? Many web hosting companies offer a variety of options. Upon glancing at them, you might think that they are all the same with just different prices. However, there are many key differences that make these services different. The best web hosting services offers live assistance supports the latest script, and has a high bandwidth limit.

Bandwidth
What is bandwidth anyways? In black and white bandwidth is the amount of traffic that is allowed to occur between your web site and the rest of the internet. The hosting services bandwidth is determined by its connection type. This relates both internally and externally. The higher the bandwidth the faster your page will load and this will help in terms of SEO which will get your page listed on Google, Yahoo, and MSN faster.

Do You Have Enough Bandwidth For Your Traffic?
A good analogy for bandwidth is the cars and the freeway. Simply, if you are on the freeway and you are down to one lane than the traffic is going to go super slow. However, if you are on the freeway and there are 12 lanes than the traffic will be easier and bandwidth works the same way.

There are a couple of different formulas you need if you want to determine how much bandwidth you need for you site. There is one for determining a traditional page which does not have any downloading information from you. If you do not have anyone downloading information from your page the simple formula for determining how much bandwidth you need is:

No Download Formula:
Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size x 31 x Fudge Factor

However, if you are setting up a site where people download videos, pictures, pdfs, etc. then there is an alternate formula that you should use for calculating your bandwidth needed. The formula for downloading is as follows:

Download Formula:
[(Average Daily Visitors x Average Page Views x Average Page Size) +
(Average Daily File Downloads x Average File Size)] x 31 x Fudge Factor

Defining These Formula Terms
Average Daily Visitors: This is number of visitors that you expect to come to your site. There is no limit to what you anticipate to come to your site. There could be 5 people a day or 10,000,000 people coming to your site a day.

Average Page Views: You may have 100 pages on your site. If the average person looks at your site and views 10 pages then you have to keep that in mind when determining the average page views.
Average Page Size: You need to figure out how big each page is in kilobytes (KB.) If you do not know how big your web pages are you can estimate it. To find out the average size take all of your pages add them together and then divide by the total number of web pages. Remember to calculate the size of pages in kilobytes.
Average Daily File Downloads: This number is an anticipated number of downloads per day.
Average File Size: This is similar to average page size but in order to know this number you need to calculate the files that will be downloaded. To get this figure you add all the downloadable files together and then divide by the total number of files.
Fudge Factor: This a number that is greater than one. I would generally go with 1.5 and this means that you could be off on your numbers by 50%. However, you could put a fudge factor of 2-4 to be really safe that you have a good estimate of bandwidth needed.

Important Note:
It is important to note that each hosting service host shows there bandwidth per month. This number is defined in gigabytes (GB.) A lot of companies have it set up so that you can increase your monthly bandwidth for a fixed rate. However, I would not encourage that you go ahead and pay for a ton of bandwidth until you have gained a substantial amount of traffic.

About the Author

Web hosting is vital to your web site. Without hosting your site on a server no one could view your site. Hostgator is the best web hosting service available. They offer an unlimited amount of hosting space for 7.99/month. With Hostgator you are also allowed to own unlimited domains.

There customer service is truly amazing and they offer 24/7 live help. Check out their service here: http://www.the-best-web-hosting-service.com

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One of the newest fad diets is the Japanese morning banana diet, which is all the rage in Japan. It has even been causing a shortage of bananas in some regions. Now it has caught on in the US and many people who want to lose weight are stocking up on bananas.

What is the Japanese morning banana diet? For breakfast you can eat as many bananas as you want along with warm water. Then you don't eat anything else until it's lunchtime. For lunch you can eat anything you want, it could be pizza, a hamburger and French fries. Then in the middle of the afternoon you could have a snack of anything you want. Then for dinner you could have anything you want but you have to eat before 8 PM. Then have nothing to eat before bedtime. And bedtime has to be before midnight.

No one seems to know for sure how or if the Japanese banana diet works. It could be because the bananas make you feel full. The bananas have a lot of fiber so they tend to make you feel like you have had enough to eat.

Gorging on a few bananas at one sitting is probably not a good idea as eating too many can raise your blood sugar and that can be a problem if you are diabetic or prediabetic and haven't been diagnosed.

So one of the problems is you can gorge yourself at lunch and dinner and eat as many calories as you want, which may be more fat and calories than you are eating now. And many people who usually eat a lot of sweets in the evening may actually lose weight.

Or if you are one of those people who snacks a lot in the afternoon and are limited to one snack and now can't eat any snacks in the evening, you may lose weight and unwanted belly fat .

The Japanese morning banana diet doesn't explain why you are to drink warm water at breakfast. Perhaps it's to help with digestion or to replace hot coffee or hot tea that you might normally drink. And some people do drink warm water in the morning anyway.

The Japanese morning banana diet frenzy started when it was reported that a well known Japanese actress said she lost 25 pounds on it.

Bananas have wonderful health benefits. They are full of nutritional energy. Bananas, besides having a lot of fiber, contain protein and fat.

They are comprised of 76% water, 20% sugar, 12% starch, many vitamins and phytonutrients and have a lot of fiber. As for minerals they are high in potassium and also contain calcium, iron, magnesium, phosphorus, sodium, zinc, copper and manganese.

But just like the cabbage soup diet and the grapefruit diet, bananas by themselves cannot work miracles.

Best weight loss tip: The best natural way to lose weight, lose pounds and lose inches and also the fast way to lose weight is with plant foods, of which bananas are one. Eating lots of fresh raw fruits including bananas, and raw vegetables along with some nuts and seeds and plenty of pure filtered water will cause you to lose weight fast and enjoy all the health benefits that come with it. Eating raw foods, also called living foods, can be a lifetime diet. The Japanese morning banana diet is just another fad diet that not only may disappoint but cause health problems you don't want.

About the Author

For secrets on weight loss, losing weight, belly fat loss and weight loss diets go to a nurse's website http://www.Best-Weight-Loss-Secrets.com for the best dieting tips and for raw food recipes, raw food diets, losing weight with raw foods, see a nurse/raw food expert's: http://www.RecipesRaw.com

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